Selection Egypt
Sprints
Sprints is the first end-to-end solution to bridge the tech talent gap – starting from assessing the talent, delivering a customized learning journey, securing a top-paying job, then supporting our alumni career growth.
The Problem
Unskilled Junior Techies: Last year, 506K graduated from Egyptian universities. 187K graduated from tech-related faculties such as engineering, IT, science, and business faculties. Graduates struggle to find tech jobs, while tech-enabled companies are struggling to find good calibers. This shortage of qualified calibers is one of the top reasons that limit the company’s growth and, accordingly, the number of jobs created.
Unavailable Senior Techies: We interviewed 70+ tech-enabled companies, SMEs, and startups about the main challenges that limit their growth. In the top 2 reasons, the answers always included the shortage of senior “skilled” techies. Without enough senior techies, companies are not able to offer the best products/services. And even when a company is able to deliver a best-in-class product/service and wants to increase its tech team size to scale its business, it faces a huge challenge due to the lack of talented senior techies in the Egyptian market. The quick solution that companies do is to headhunt from other companies and offer higher salaries. The company that loses the seniors is severely impacted and starts to headhunt other companies offering higher salaries. This vicious cycle leads to dramatic increases in the salaries of senior techies whether they are talented or not. This leads to instability in the tech teams and increases the companies expenses. More than 80% of the interviewed companies said that they have current business opportunities, but they can’t grab them due to the unavailability of the techies that can realize the solutions. The current efforts to resolve this severe issue are minimal and almost with no impact.
Digital illiteracy of Entrepreneurs: We interviewed 60+ entrepreneurs, asking them about the top challenges they face in their startups. One of the top challenges for entrepreneurs with no technical backgrounds was their lack of required technical, digital, and software skills.
The Solution
The project aims to create, match and improve high-quality well-paying jobs for youth. The target is to have satisfied youth with their well-paying and empowering jobs. Matching of 1000 Youth: This can be achieved only if young people have the skills required by the market. Employers need candidates with proven records and with good technical, personal, and business skills. Sprints helps youth assess the level of skills they have and helps them improve their technical, business, and soft skills gaps.
We aim to create, match and improve youth employment.
300 Jobs Created for Freelancers: TechLeap offers programs that help young people improve their skills to a level where they can be self-employed as freelancers/remote workers for global customers. This creates new jobs outside of the local market. On this part, TechLeap focuses on some additional skills which are essential for freelancers.
Self-employment also offers the perfect conditions for Egyptian women and helps them keep the work-life balance and the cultural obligations that women need to deal with while they are moving on in their tech careers. That’s why we partnered with AL7AREFA and other freelancing platforms.
200 Jobs created by tech-enabled startups: TechLeap comes up with the TechPreneur program, which is its primary tool to create jobs. Through this program, entrepreneurs develop the required tech, software, and digital skills to create and scale their startups. TechPreneur helps select the right technical solution to address the business problem, supports hiring/partnering with the right tech team, and enables the entrepreneur with needed technologies, tools, and frameworks knowledge to optimize/automate the startup operations and scale the business. By supporting the creation and scaling of tech-enabled startups, we create more tech-enabled jobs.
300 Improved Techies Jobs: Upskilling the existing employees to a higher seniority level by giving them advanced tech programs will enable those companies to grab more opportunities, hence, hiring more juniors whom those seniors can lead.
700 improved/retained non-techies Jobs: Through the tech for the non-techies program, we plan to cover all the essential tech skills that any employee should have.
Additionality
CFYE funding will support in:
• Scaling: 2500 jobs can be impacted instead of 1000 jobs as in our reference case.
• Encouraging other investors to invest in Sprints’ social impact model.
• We will be able to kick off multiple new matching programs that target top-paying tech jobs in Mobile, Data Science, and Telecom Engineering.
• Enable Sprints to direct more campaigns towards rural areas. With CFYE, we target 40% of learners from rural areas instead of the current 20%.
• The Kick-off of the “TechPreneur program”, “Tech for non-techies program”, and “Freelancing program’ will be kicked off earlier by 6-12 months than initially planned.
• We will achieve a minimum of 50% women grads.
• Creating other tech programs that can match/improve more jobs with better quality in terms of “decent work”.
• Investment in gamification, automatic scoring, and video production all increase the quality and scalability.
• Developing a Youth Inclusion Strategy, Decent Work Approach, Monitoring & Evaluation Approach.
